A commenter on a recent post mentioned the experience of highlighting substantial parts of a work by Nietzsche while working on an essay. Years later, he found the text and tried reading those parts he hadn’t highlighted, to see what was in the sections that he didn’t find significant at the time. He then went on to ask if a similar experiment has ever been done with the Bible. I’m not aware of something of this sort ever having been... Read more
I discovered the blog Geeks of Doom yesterday. It included this T-shirt image that all fans of Monty Python will understand and enjoy. While a few of you may actually want to get the T-shirt, I suspect that even those who don’t will want to share the image. Also from that site is a lot more to enjoy, including a T-shirt for Mordor University. And also in the realm of Monty Python, Jim West blogged about the Holy Flying Circus.... Read more
The next new episode of Doctor Who, “Let’s Kill Hitler,” will air later this month. In the mean time, the BBC has released a prequel: Read more
Pete Rollins has an excellent post on cutting the Bible (without anyone noticing). Here’s a sample that I considered particularly poignant: There have been various attempts by the liberal tradition within Christianity to remove parts of the Bible that they don’t agree with (e.g. the Jefferson Bible), something that conservative Christians have vehemently attacked. However the truth is that the conservative Christians simply engage in a different, more clandestine, form of deletion. One that doesn’t require physically cutting up the... Read more
The blog Synoptic Solutions, at the end of a post on the tradition history of the story about the stilling of the storm, shared these thoughts relevant to the topic of mythicism, which I thought deserve attention and discussion: He most closely resembles one of the tannaim, the rabbinic scholars and holy men of the Talmud and related texts. The Jesus of the Signs Gospel is thoroughly Jewish. But are the rabbis of the Talmud mythical? One might try to... Read more
Due to a truly impressive amount of blogging about matters related to the Bible, I have decided to offer an early edition of the September 2011 Biblical Studies Carnival, which provides a round-up of posts from August 2011. Here is a carnival featuring the posts from the first half of this month. I have tried to include all sorts of things that are related to the academic study of the Bible, or should be of interest to those who focus... Read more
I want to offer condolences to all those whose friends or family were killed or injured when the stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fairgrounds after a sudden strong gust of wind last night. The image that has impressed me most is the video below, in which you see the stage collapse, and then the immediate, instinctive reaction of so many people present, not to run away to safety but to run forward, to help in any way they can. Read more
The pastor of my church has been preaching through the plagues in Exodus, and has been sharing from The Brick Testament as a way of introducing the stories. Today’s subject was the plague of hail, and The Brick Testament nicely highlights the absurdity of some details in that story if you’ve been taking the language of earlier plagues literally: It even depicts some Egyptians dragging their dead livestock into their homes to protect it from the hail: But while it... Read more
You’re free to order the book, and free not to – right? That’s a surprisingly controversial subject. Free will, consciousness, and many other aspects of our human experience remain puzzles to philosophers, neuroscientists, would-be programmers of artificial intelligences, and of course, science fiction fans. Pondering what would be involved in creating an artificially intelligent computer program is one of the thought experiments that can help us reflect on what it means to be human, to be conscious, and to be... Read more
I just discovered that P. N. Harrison’s 1921 book The problem of the Pastoral Epistles is available for free from the Internet Archive. While plenty of more recent works treat the arguments against Pauline authorship perfectly well, they lack one thing that Harrison’s book has: charts graphing the differences between the Pastorals and other letters attributed to Paul on the one hand, and similarities to many of the earliest church fathers on the other. If you have never read it,... Read more
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